Book Progress

Posted on June 3, 2014 by ehurst

The Practice of Christian Mysticism is up to ten chapters now. Most of it will not be new to regular readers, though perhaps expressed freshly. Some of it is drawn from older documents on my static site, some from even older stuff I no longer have posted. The book will refer readers to A Course in Biblical Mysticism and Biblical Morality for what they cover and focus mostly on helping believers to understand and implement a mystical view of Christian religion. This should enable people to rebuild a better personal religion, because I generally avoid theology and religious content itself. The final chapters will echo the two previous posts on Church Admin.

About the only thing puzzling me right now is why I get this odd impression I need to finish up and get it published. For once it’s not the burning urge to get the stuff out of my head; I’ve experienced relatively little of that this time around. Instead, it’s more like I need to get it out there because folks will be needing it rather soon.

Honestly, that thought is just a little troubling.

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Applied Linkage

Posted on June 2, 2014 by ehurst

Sometimes I come across links and can’t keep them to myself. Especially when they serve so well to illustrate things I teach. So instead of a long lecture today, let’s see what’s going on out there in the real world.

Dave Ramsey runs a ministry, but it’s also a business. Like so many other corporate style religious organization, this cannot turn out well for the religion part. Apparently Ramsey runs his organization on fear and hatred. I am inclined to believe the article simply because I’ve run into some ugliness from Ramsey’s organization in the past. His staffers tend to be rather arrogant at times with the churches that host some of his presentations. They make unreasonable demands from folks who simply volunteered to help out, ordering them around like serfs. You come to the point when you decide this isn’t godly and there’s something very wrong behind the scenes.

On the same page where I found that one, I ran into this one where the author misses the point when describing how the Southern Baptist denomination is in decline. The analysis assumes all the nonsense you would expect from secularists. The problem with Southern Baptists is that they remain a mostly cultural expression of some slender thread of genuine religion, and to the degree it depends on that particular culture, the fervor fades when that culture dies.

One of the fundamental points behind my teaching, and particularly the book I’m working on, is that we need to find another basis for building our religion than what has been used by most Western churches, particularly American churches. The Western affinity for a particular culture drawn from the Enlightenment, and the affinity for corporate structure in churches leads to some truly hideous implementations. Most American churches are more American than church. Tying your religion to something so transitory as a single cultural milieu is asking for trouble. That most churches choose only one identifiable portion of the culture does not make them any less worldly in the main.

We could go on to discuss the Baptist obsession with presuming to make born-again disciples, but producing instead vast hordes of folks who appear spiritually stillborn. Or we could discuss the worship with all sorts of emotional drama but producing no real change in the people. The preaching and teaching are intellectually stimulating, but don’t really plug people into their spirits. They are deeply confused about what is spiritual, insisting that spiritual is just a better brand of intellect. I should know; I was one of them, a clergyman among them, for a large part of my life.

One more thing regarding a popular meme: Has anyone beside me noticed that “man up” usually translates to a demand that the man in question surrender everything that makes him a man instead of a slave? “Man to man” means setting aside all privilege and working together as equals to a mutually beneficial end.

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Ch-ch-ch-changes

Posted on June 1, 2014 by ehurst

First, I’m grateful to all of you who subscribe (now nearly 400) or who regularly check this blog. I am flattered and blessed by your attention. So far as I know, this blog will not depart from the message that may have brought you here. I feel certain the coming days will provide more and new things to write about in the same vein.

Second, I’ve deactivated my Facebook account. Together with a long train of previous annoyances, the account controls failed to work for me and I was reminded that nobody really owns their FB account. It’s there for the convenience of folks who do not really like you and certainly don’t love Jesus. That other FB folks can use it is merely the alleged draw for sucking you into it. What does not serve my mission calling has to go.

Finally, the book I’ve recently made noise about won’t make it. That is, a book on Church Admin alone is not enough material for a book. So the project becomes the book I should have written some time ago: The Practice of Christian Mysticism. If you paid any attention at all to the previous articles about Church Admin, you should have some idea where this is going. I’ll include a lot more material about the whole practical implementation of the mystical approach to Christian religion.

On an administrative note, I’m moving away from the email addresses at soulkiln.org (my static site) (now closed). Aside from the Cox address noted a few posts back, I’m also adding a new one from Live Mail: br073n at outlook dot com. That’s lower case BR with a zero-seven-three followed by a lower case N. For those of you not familiar with numerical replacement of letters (hacker writing), it’s the word “broken” — obvious religious connotations.

God bless you.

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Job 42

Posted on May 31, 2014 by ehurst

Job confesses that God is beyond limits as He is the One who created boundaries. God’s divine justice cannot be thwarted by anything or anyone within Creation. Then Job answers the two direct questions God asked of him, in recognition that he is the one accountable here. He confessed that his mouth outran his human understanding. Then he notes that, while previously his only knowledge of God was the oral traditions of revelation, now he has met God face to face, insofar as such a thing could be. The one thing Job had sought had arrived, and it was nothing as he had expected. At the meeting with God, the only thing in his mind was the overwhelming sense of mortality and his immeasurable need to repent.

The answer to Job’s suffering is a simple matter of perspective. Fallen man is quite fortunate when he does not suffer, because no degree of moral righteousness is sufficient to cover his fallen nature.

The epilogue returns us to the same prose as the prologue. God instructed the trio to repent and present their offerings before Job as God’s chosen representative, His priest for the occasion. The offerings were substantial according to the customs of their social rank. God scolded them as lying against Himself when they lied about Job’s moral purity. Job wanted answers and was ready to learn; these men refused any answer that was not small enough to fit inside their human reasoning. We are thus left doubting they learned much from this encounter, and the symbolism reminds us that there will ever be people who will need the ministry of a precious few who do have clear spiritual insight.

When Job performed his ritual duties for them, the Lord then restored Job’s fortunes. He moved the hearts of others to enrich Job and he ended up with twice what he had before this all started. It was not because Job was such a worthy fellow, but because the message of God and His glory would be hindered otherwise. That’s the whole reason for anything, be it pleasant or unpleasant in our lives pursuing moral purity. God’s divine justice is its own reward.

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Church Admin: Rationale

Posted on May 31, 2014 by ehurst

Despite my affinity for the Internet and what I regard as the rising Networked Civilization, I will be the first to tell you it’s not enough. It’s not enough as a basis for building a solid revelation community on this earth. We can use the Internet as the message protocol in the absence of propinquity (a fancy word meaning close together in time and space). We cannot use networking as a replacement for propinquity.

Over the years on this blog I’ve tried to teach the discipline of hearing from the Holy Spirit. The hardest thing we do in this direction is learning to silence the voices inside our heads that do not originate with God. This is not something easily taught online. It requires hanging out with people who are better than you at distinguishing internal noise from the clear voice of Heaven. While I can tell you clinically that it is a matter of bouncing things off of your convictions, it takes a good bit of face time to clarify how that works individually. This is just one critical lesson that requires a meat space congregation, among others.

My convictions tell me that we are on the threshold of a time when we will need the awareness and skills necessary to form churches that answer to the teachings of Christian Mysticism. My worst nightmare is that someone should become confused about my intent and somehow imagine that this is the birth of yet another sectarian denomination. Christian Mysticism is not about content, but method of gaining content. Our efforts here are not aimed at establishing a peculiar theology in the typical sense of what we’ve all seen so far. We are seeking merely to return to the fundamental principles of life itself as revealed in Scripture. Such principles will most assuredly affect how we do church. As the world around us changes, whatever comes at us is best faced with the ancient truth that hasn’t changed since Creation.

That we are facing some big changes in our world is obvious to anyone capable of understanding what I teach here. I shouldn’t have to convince you, dear reader. Just what will change, in what way, and how much is all likely a matter of educated guess, at best. It’s the wrong question anyway. We who seek to walk by the Spirit are more interested in how He is reshaping us and what He demands of us whatever the context. That the renovations in our souls are fitting us for future service should be all too clear.

So whatever it is coming at us, I am convinced writing this book on Church Administration for the Christian Mystic is a vital necessity. It’s not as if I expect a sudden rush of affiliates and friends grabbing onto this and planting new congregations across the globe. That may well happen, as I anticipate a significant shake-up in the established mainstream Christian religion. However, you can do choose to embrace this teaching wherever you are, regardless of the broken reality in which you abide. We live with a foot in Two Realms and the tension between what is versus what should be will never resolve itself until Our Lord returns to redeem all things. It simply is not possible to jump into the ideals from scratch. We approach this task with a full awareness — an expectation even — that our ambient reality may never quite match the vision. (Edit: The book on Church Admin ain’t happening, but I did write a book that included the ideas.)

But we need that vision. The whole point of having churches in the First Century was roughly equivalent to synagogues, in that they were incubators for moral change. Spiritual change is something between you and God, and it’s not something anyone else can really see. But moral change is obvious to those who see God’s divine moral character. People bring all their humanity and darkness into a place where the light of eternal truth shines, and each individual begins making the journey from darkness to light in concert and with support of others making similar journeys. The idea of church is to promote moral change, not demand it all at once. The act of doing church itself has to grow with the moral condition of the people.

Thus, we do not establish something organizationally immutable, but something living and dynamic in its very nature and structure. We do not reason our way to some ideal structure and drive the people into it, making various members fit the image. Rather, we work from a model that starts with the people and builds on their commitments. The planning and operations arise from what optimizes the resources at hand. The goal is not growth in numbers, budget and facilities, but growth in individual moral awareness and commitment. We could just as easily dissolve the organization at any time when it cannot fit the human need.

So the task is to grow morals; we do not assay to grow the church organization. The core is not ideas, ideals and organization. Rather, organization arises from the people involved. We do not build a structure to which people must sign on and treat as some manifestation of God. The church has no goals outside the souls of the people. Rather, the church is a response to a very real moral need in the people.

There is a minimal structure offered repeatedly in the New Testament, and it’s obviously based on what prevailed in the Old Testament. It rises on the necessity of two offices: pastor-priest and elder-chief. The former is a ritual and spiritual role; the latter is organizational. Whether the congregation is literal family is not material to the question. They are covenant family first and foremost. Their shared DNA is spiritual. God intended that these families should operate along certain broad ideas that can be fitted to any context.

It is those broad ideas we examine in this study. While you and I can easily observe how churches today might give lip service to some of the concepts stated above, the concrete results are still very much according to the Western Enlightenment traditions. We have to be careful because too many words have been perverted and twisted to give a church and its organization the wrong shape. A major element in this work will be redefining the terms.

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Church Admin: Background

Posted on May 30, 2014 by ehurst

American religion is more cult than Christianity.

A common mistake among American evangelicals is assuming that the US is a covenant nation. They dress the founding of the US all up in sacred hues, as if God somehow decided to sponsor Enlightenment philosophy instead of His revealed Word. The US Constitution is a very classic Enlightenment document. It is a very long way from being a biblical document. The debate about whether some of Founding Fathers were mere deists or actually true believers is a waste of time because even the true believers were so thoroughly Enlightenment in orientation that it’s ludicrous to suggest they were biblical.

Take a moment to consider how most Western churches remain deeply stained by the social philosophy of their birth. The Catholics are medieval, along with a few other competitors. The Lutherans are Reformist, but the other Reformed groups are more Enlightenment. Virtually every church flavor arising on American soil is strongly Enlightenment in basic assumptions about reality. They are a very long way from the initial Hebrew orientation of the churches in the first century. That’s a plain factual observation without noting whether it’s good or bad.

Treating the US as somehow sacred and special, right up next to the historical Nation of Israel, is most certainly a bad thing. It lends itself to some very destructive and anti-gospel behavior.

It’s bad enough that a very real intent we can discern was to infect similar evangelical churches in other countries with the same burning political fervor, but that same cynical intent was to cause evangelicals in other nations to regard America as somehow special and holy. That was a critical point in the funding and propaganda that shaped and reinforced this weird cultic fervor. What’s worse is that this cult excuses a vast array of abuses against those who don’t happen to be fully committed to that cult.

What we then have is a vast political fervor to enforce a particular brand of social morality backed by an implacable sense that this is what God requires. Further, the thinking asserts that choosing to remain on American soil is tacit acceptance of this imaginary covenant and all the enforcements that go with it. The essentially materialistic assumptions of Western thinking only makes this worse.

The entire New Testament is loaded with both hints and blunt assertions that we cannot get too involved with this world as something important to us. We are told throughout that we should expect conflict and persecution and not whine about it, but rejoice that we are called to share in the Cross of Christ. Somehow we’ve inserted a huge caveat in our thinking that when Christians can get control of government, things will be different. The New Testament pointedly steers believers away from seeking involvement in human government in the first place.

Go all the way back to John the Baptist. He didn’t tell those soldiers to desert their uniform, despite the general hatred among Jews for Romans. He told them to serve honorably and obey God’s Moral Law in the process. His whole message was for them to take what comes until God sets them free from what amounted to slavery, and not try to to feather their nest on the way. A similar otherworldly focus was burned into his message to everyone else. Worry about your own holiness and let God sort out everyone else.

That was preparation for following the Lamb of God. In the New Testament we see a powerful emphasis on, not making Gentiles into Jews, but helping outsiders understand the true essence of what it meant to be Israel morally, not merely religiously or politically. The Covenant of Moses was closed; the Covenant of Christ was born and it carried forward in bold terms what had always been implied by Moses. The meaning of the name “Israel” was restored to its original place — it was the name for a mission to reveal God to fallen men.

We obey the Laws of God, not so much in the particulars of the Law Covenants, because those were contextual examples. Rather, we obey the moral imperatives of God that gave the covenants life and meaning. But while we have a mandate to take that into all the world, by no means do we put our hands to human politics at large. God has all human governments in His hands. Our only part in any kind of human government is within the covenant family, the congregation gathered in Christ’s name.

To follow Christ includes building an ephemeral human manifestation of the Kingdom of Heaven in our church bodies. That Kingdom of Heaven is of necessity very much like the Hebrew feudalism in shape and operation. The local church cannot claim to follow Christ if we do not operate on His politics, which have nothing to do with theories of human polity arising from any part of history outside Ancient Israel. It is not a mere cultural and historical artifact. The Hebrew feudal government remains the one best expression of how Creation itself is wired, and thus how every human is meant to live. We could teach this to the world at large, but the enforcement in our hands stops at the boundaries of spiritual willingness to participate in the Covenant of Christ.

If we do not restore our local church body to that ancient pattern, we will remain a cult of mixed religious and philosophical influences very far from Christ.

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Email Service Troubles

Posted on May 29, 2014 by ehurst

For the time being, anyone seeking to email me should use my Cox address: jhurst18 at cox dot net.

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Talking Past Each Other 2

Posted on May 29, 2014 by ehurst

(The previous post by the same title is about computer stuff, but the principles are similar.)

You cannot prove God exists, and they cannot prove He doesn’t.

We who are spiritual are aliens to those who aren’t spiritual. They live in an entirely different world. This is merely an extension of all my rattling about epistemology; that fancy word does have very real-world consequences. If you choose to enter into a debate with the non-spiritual folks, you have already surrendered the very foundation of our existence as believers. They will most certainly not come over to where we stand to discuss this. They deny that there is anything outside their own realm of understanding.

Get comfortable with the idea that you will be labeled “elitist” when they are being kind and generous. When you set out to understand faith the way we do on this blog, it requires digging into a lot of obscure academic material. It’s not as if faith requires it, but all that stuff is required if you have any hope of explaining it in academic terms. You have to ready to explain that most debaters and non-believers are holding to a historical minority position. Only a tiny slice of humanity since whatever one imagines as “The Beginning” have ever held to the common assumptions of Western epistemology. All that stuff in the Bible takes place outside this tiny brief period of highly restricted reasoning.

Again, our reckoning includes theirs, but we consider theirs a primitive approach that ignores a vast wealth of intellectual treasure they exclude, if they are aware of it at all. We understand Western social mythology as part of much broader understanding of human existence. If someone from within that narrow range of intellect insists on engaging us in debate, we have to decline on the grounds they simply aren’t ready to take on our position because it’s outside their range. Unless they understand the Ancient Near Eastern epistemology, they don’t have any grounds for approaching our faith and the resulting belief statements.

In that sense, faith could never be “rational” because that would disembowel faith. Faith makes the most unreasonable demands because it is built on a far higher level of reasoning. It’s not that we don’t understand their position; we do. They cannot understand ours.

God and all our dealings with Him stand outside the human realm.

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Eldercraft as Church Administration

Posted on May 28, 2014 by ehurst

If you don’t feel it in your bones, you’ll never do it well.

I’m a born administrator. It’s a talent from God and fundamental to the way I think. In my mind, I regard it as moral engineering. That is, God has granted me an understanding of His revelation, His moral character, and how that all applies to human behavior. My calling is to engineer the context for optimal morality — defined as adherence to God’s Laws. Such adherence reaps the rewards of God’s direct and indirect support of the activities.

Looking back over my life, every time I faced a test of not having a clue how to do something, my response predictably arose from an organic administrative approach. I didn’t really learn organizational theory; I absorbed it intuitively. When I first saw the term “organizational theory” in writing, I knew it was already burned into my consciousness. Further, my mind rushed to embrace ANE feudalism as the most natural thing I’d ever seen. People have always acted according to the broad assumptions in Scripture, so when I understand it in the Ancient Near Eastern intellectual context, it made perfect sense to me.

Human behavior these days surprises and puzzles me far less than it once did.

Lately I’ve spent a lot of time ruminating about these things. It has become an element in much of what I do. I sense another book coming, but it won’t be a very long one. In my prayers and meditations on this, it seems to point toward explaining some fundamentals of church administration from my unusual approach. Having read a few fat tomes about church administration, I’m still wondering how they could spend so many pages missing the point.

And it’s not that I’m such wonderfully smart and wise man, but I can’t resist the urge to poke a few more holes in the inflated façade of Western Christianity.

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Malvertising

Posted on May 26, 2014 by ehurst

Most of you will recognize the term malvertising. It’s a technique for infecting computers with malware by using the advertising feeds found on most websites. Similar with the way TV in the US is funded by advertising, this blog is also supported by advertising because I can’t afford to pay for it. That is, the agreement I make with WordPress is that they get to run advertising on my blog posts because I’m not paying them anything.

The problem is how those ads are delivered. You would routinely find an ad on a page had passed through three or more servers before it displays in your browser. The rights to post those ads are traded in many different ways. Too often, when someone pays the fees, nobody wants to ask any questions. By the time it gets to your computer, it could be the software equivalent to a nuclear device. The issue here is that advertisers never did have morals in the first place. They aren’t willing to rob people directly because it’s no fun and it’s risky. However, it makes them feel like a big stud if their skills and artistry brings in the customers. There is no trick they won’t use, and the laws are simply advisory in their minds.

There is nothing immoral about blocking advertising on the Internet. You aren’t stealing content; the advertisers are stealing your computer resources and flagrantly refusing to deal with the risk factors. Pitchmen are slimy as a whole, and the good guys are so rare we can’t find them. All of them claim they are the finest specimens of humanity, which is part of their lying sales pitch. A rare counter example is the Google text ads; simple information about the existence of a product is not a sin. How Google tries so damned hard to manipulate you by snooping on the content of your searches and your communications is a sin.

Few Internet users will go the lengths I do for computer security. I keep track of how this stuff works as part of my computer tech support ministry. I read about it every day. What follows are some suggestions based on what I’ve tried for myself.

Learn about browser extensions: Ghostery, Adblock, Click & Clean, and tools like Bleachbit or CCleaner. Learn where they are and bookmark them.

Select your browser carefully. Use more than one for different purposes. I use Seamonkey to protect my important logins. You’d need to explore the features and settings possible to understand why. It comes with a host of extensions the same as Firefox, but offers far more fine-grained user control.

I use one browser only for Facebook (Opera’s newest line of WebKit browsers) with the appropriate extensions. I chase links from FB using the “private browser window” (right-click on the link) option to prevent FB from planting tracking in that window, and to ensure that window dumps all cache when I close it.

I use the older Opera browser (12.x) for general surfing because it doesn’t need any extensions; there is a healthy content blocking tool built into it. I can also place a JavaScript blocking button on the interface itself. It takes time to identify the URL sources for unwanted content, but once it’s in place, surfing is much safer. Start learning how to use it by right-clicking on the background of any webpage and select “Block content.” When the toolbar drops down at the top, select something you would prefer not to see and click on it. A block ribbon will appear and the toolbar will offer some fine tuning with a “Details” button. Click that and observe how the URL is formatted. For some advertising URLs, I block the entire domain.

I use the latest Opera Mail client for email on my desktop because it imported everything from my long-term email usage of the older Opera browser’s built-in email client over the years. It also has a collection of safety options, such as blocking graphics and fancy formatting by default. It also imports settings and mail across different operating systems with ease.

If you really like Google’s Chrome browser, learn how to add the adblocking extensions and learn about the advanced settings that allow you some measure of control. They are not turned on by default. Also learn how to use additional profiles to isolate one kind of surfing activity from another. You should at a minimum set up a separate profile for Facebook, which remains today the single biggest threat to privacy and personal security because almost everybody uses it. This makes it a juicy fat target rich with victims for whatever evil schemes any corporation or government agency can dream up. And the folks who run FB are all too eager to help them.

Use DuckDuckGo and StartPage search engines. The former is Yandex Search with anonymity; the latter is Google with the same anonymity. StartPage also offers you a chance to chase resulting search links through a proxy viewer. That means they do all the work and take all the risks and display the content for you. It does block JavaScript so some sites look rather funny that way, but it also protects you from bad JScript.

Learn to use Lynx browser. There are instructions on older posts here how to install a version for Windows and some of the settings you’ll need to make. For my own use, I prefer to pull it up in Cygwin, a set of tools that give you Linux/Unix on your Windows computer. While some sites will block the Lynx browser based on obsolete assumptions that it’s a hacking tool, it’s still the best way to get textual content with far less hassle and risk. Once you get used to how it renders pages, you can quickly find information you seek.

Install CryptoPrevent on your Windows computer; it will save you a great deal of heartache in the long run. It blocks malware trying to launch and install from your browser cache.

The single biggest change is inside your own head. If the Internet for you is all about entertainment and multimedia content, and more particularly gaming, you will always be at high risk. Porn-surfing is easily the highest risk behavior on the Net. I’m not telling you those pursuits are evil at this point, only that they are inextricably linked with exposure to malware. The predators who make that evil software are counting on your desire for zeal for such pursuits to hinder your risk awareness. Those pursuits are the essence of advertising, trying to sucker you into something you really want in exchange for a measure of slavery.

My blog is littered with more details on how to do some of this stuff. Use the search box built into the blog interface. The main point to remember is that, with advertisers being so rapaciously irresponsible about filtering out malvertising, you have every right to block their crap until they clean up their act. You shouldn’t expect that too soon.

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